Scott Baradell edits and contributes to Black Star Rising. A former newspaper journalist and executive for Belo Corp., Scott is an accomplished brand strategist who leads the Dallas-based Idea Grove agency. He has nearly two decades of experience working closely with professional photographers, both as a journalist and as a corporate photography buyer. He has consulted for Black Star since 2006.

The print magazine, in which all the cover photos are reproduced inside, offers clues that portraits are composites, but never says so directly. “We decided that 20 different covers had a nice ring to it. That meant 20 individual photo shoots,” Graydon Carter writes in his editor’s letter.

Vanity Fair has been known to blur the line between standards of photojournalism and those of the advertising world — last year adding the picture of an absent journalist to a group photo of Vietnam War correspondents.

It may be sooner than we think. I’m sure that 20 years ago, the journalists at CNN never thought — in a million years — that their network would become a 24-hour Paris Hilton talkfest. But little by little, that’s what’s become of it.